HENRI-JOSEPH HARPIGNIES
Harpignies, Henri-Joseph
(b Valenciennes, 24 July 1819; d Saint-Privé, 28 Aug 1916).
French painter and printmaker. He came from a prosperous, solidly bourgeois background. A precocious draughtsman, he received elementary art training at the municipal school and became a talented cellist who enjoyed playing the chamber music of Haydn and Beethoven in later life. His artistic career was delayed by employment in the family iron forges at Denain and at the Famars sugar refinery, although he drew caricatures under the influence of the great French satirical lithographers. In 1838 he was exposed to a wider variety of French landscape during a two-month tour with a family friend Dr Lachèze, who also introduced Harpignies to the landscape painter and etcher Jean-Alexis Achard (1807-84), with whom he studied in Paris in 1846. His first significant group of paintings and drawings in a marginally Realist style was made with his master at Crémieu in late 1847, but the Revolution of 1848 obliged him to return home. He then stayed with Achard in Brussels, producing his first sequence of etchings.
Although Harpignies painted occasional still-lifes, interiors and, early in his career, figure subjects, principally of children (e.g. Sauve qui peut, exh. Salon 1857; Valenciennes, Mus. B.-A.), he was primarily a painter of landscape and town, especially of Paris. He travelled widely but is associated above all with central France and the countryside around the River Loire and its tributaries, the Nièvre and the Allier. Fully assimilating the mannerisms of most of the Barbizon painters besides Corot, he carried their subjects, vision and stylistic assumptions into the 20th century, distilling an immediately recognizable personal style of limited range and sophisticated compositional variation. A blue luminosity is often the strongest colour note in a generally greyish-green palette of delicately nuanced tonal values, with a recurring disposition for overlapping planes in a frequently flattened perspective. Strength and concision also characterize his painting. He advocated linear clarity and distinct outline, but nevertheless fluctuated between a bland evenness of form and a diaphanous, feathery handling of separate touches. Within his overall naturalistic preoccupations, stylization is always apparent. A resolute conservative for over 60 years, adhering to a low-keyed conception of ordered nature, he showed hints of Art Nouveau and Japoniste taste and, for all his recorded antipathy, marginal traces of an Impressionist, even a Post-Impressionist, aesthetic. His range extended in scale from painted lampshades to decorative designs for public buildings in Paris (Opéra, Sénat, Hôtel de Ville).
His output during a long career was immense and his watercolours particularly have remained popular during the partial eclipse of his formidable reputation as a painter in oils.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
H. Béraldi: Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle, viii (Paris, 1889), pp. 61-3
L. Bénédite: 'Harpignies (1819-1916)', Gaz. B.-A., n. s. 4, xiii (1917), pp. 207-53
Henri Harpignies (exh. cat., Valenciennes, Mus. B.-A., 1970)
P. Miquel: Le Paysage français au XIXe siècle, 1824-1874, iii (Maurs-la-Jolie, 1975)
P. Gosset: Henri Harpignies (1819-1916) (Valenciennes, 1982)
HARLEY PRESTON
© Oxford University Press 2007
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